Ben Thomas is a 3rd year student at the uni of Birmingham. He’s passionate about Jesus and he loves American Football. This is his journey of trying to bring the two together and seeing God move…

“I had just finished my second year playing on the American Football team at University, and it had been a difficult two years juggling both my sport and my faith, with sport often winning out as my priority when things clashed.

Over the following summer I had been praying and knew that I needed to put God back at number one and for me that meant stepping away from the team. I let my coaches know that I was going to stop at the beginning of this year as my faith was the most important thing to me, and although they were disappointed I was really surprised by their respect for my decision to follow what I believed in.

I still hung around the team when I had the chance to and after one of the team’s pre-season games the head coach spoke to me and said that he would love to have me back and he would be happy to facilitate any Church commitments I had. He also asked my friend and I to give a talk in front of the team about what faith meant to us, so I took him up on the offer.

When we shared our faith with the team loads of the guys came up to us after with more questions and wanting to know more. Off of the back of that, we put the offer out to anyone who knew God or was interested to meet before training on Thursdays, and about 20 people started coming to talk about faith and our “Kingdom Lions” group formed at the heart of the “Birmingham Lions” American football team.

Since then we’ve been meeting each week before training and talking about testimonies, salvation, and God’s radical and unchanging love for every single one of us.

It’s been a crazy journey of small steps of obedience, and I’m sure God will only continue to surprise us, but I am so thankful to Him for making a way and bringing so much life to our practice fields and our classrooms.”